[Today: Move over Babe...]
“I want to play music when I want, write a song if I want or watch a baseball game if I want.” – John Lee Hooker
*****
Growing up, I was a pretty nice kid. But when it came to trading baseball cards, I was a hard-nosed little bastard – a Donald Trump in short pants looking to swindle you out of your valuable old cards. Most kids were taken with the stars of the day, but I lived for vintage cards of minted Hall Of Fame legends. I turned stacks of George Brett, Robin Yount and Mike Schmidt cards into treasures like Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. I still have Roger Maris’ 1961 card with 61 homers on the back. But one of my favorite cards in the stacks of booty I traded for as a kid is my 1974 Topps Hank Aaron. This card prominently features the words NEW ALL-TIME HOME RUN KING on the front of the card, even though Hammerin’ Hank’s 1973 stats on the back showed him to still be one homer short of Babe Ruth’s hallowed record of 714 career home runs.
One panel of the back of the card features a small cartoon of a baseball player wearing a crown, with the reassuring caption that “Hank becomes baseball’s all-time homer king in 1974.” But what if he hadn’t? What if Aaron had been pulverized in a sausage factory accident, or leveled by a runaway mobile home during the off-season? Even though I acquired the card ten years after Aaron had surpassed Ruth’s homer total, my mind still raced with scenarios that would have made this the most valuable and tragic baseball card on earth.
Little did I know that Aaron’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record was anything but a ticker-tape coronation. He received a staggering amount of hate mail as he closed in on the record, including many death threats. As the 1974 season opened, he was trailed by armed bodyguards who were positioned in the stands during play, on the lookout for snipers and other would-be assassins. None of this came out at the time of course, and Aaron’s home run chase was a welcome tonic to a country watching Watergate unfold and Vietnam wind down.
One man who was celebrating in his funkiest suit was John Lee Hooker. His 1974 album Free Beer And Chicken is anchored by the two-song suite ’713 Blues’ and ’714 Blues’, a pair of slithering funk celebrations that sound like the furthest thing from the blues. “Move over, make way, ’cause Henry Henry is moving in… talking ’bout Henry Ahhhhhn” sings Hooker like a man approaching ecstasy. On April 8th, 1974, Aaron hit his 715th career homer to set a new record.
This LP was envisioned as a project pairing Hooker with standout rock musicians of the day. Why that effort was abandoned we’ll never know, but the verbiage for it (“…accompanied by a goodly number of… rock and roll heavies…”) remains on the back of the album cover. That project at least explains the presence of Joe Cocker on two tracks. It must be said that having Joe Cocker sing instead of John Lee Hooker is akin to having Jerry Royster pinch-hit for Hank Aaron. But Cocker’s tracks aren’t bad, and Free Beer And Chicken comes off as a nasty funk album that balances Hooker classics (‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’) with newfound pleasures (‘Make It Funky’).
According to venerable record store Dusty Groove, “The groove is very hard and funky, with tight drumbreaks and excellent basslines that you’d hardly expect to find on an album by a blues artist… the record’s got some very nice breaks!” It’s worth noting that you don’t have to be a turntabulist or baseball geek to enjoy this album, but those qualifications don’t hurt…
Listen: 713 Blues
Listen: 714 Blues
Listen: Make It Funky
4 October 2010 at 12:11 pm |
thnx gawd!
4 January 2012 at 11:21 pm |
Thats why they call me . . . myth buster!